Monthly Archives: February 2010
Electric stimulation may help stroke victims swallow
Tiny electric shocks to the throat may help stroke victims overcome disabling swallowing difficulties, a small British study suggests.
from Medline Plus.gov
What Is Laryngitis? What Causes Laryngitis?
Laryngitis is an inflammation of the larynx due to overuse, irritation or infection. Inside the larynx are the vocal cords. The irritation causes a hoarse voice or the complete loss of the voice.
Communication From Belgian Coma Patient Proven False Three Months After Study
While facilitated communication has proven faulty in this case, doctors continue to explore myriad variations in diagnoses of patients in vegetative states to determine whether or not the diagnosis still retains validity.
The effects of breastfeeding on cognitive and neurological development of children at 9 years
Breastfeeding was not associated with any crude IQ advantage or difference in neurological soft signs in children at 9 years. The greater IQ score associated with breastfeeding is accounted for by confounding, with maternal and socio-economic characteristics particularly important.
Household food security is associated with early childhood language development: results from a longitudinal study in rural Bangladesh
Household food security is positively associated with subsequent language development of rural Bangladeshi children. Early language development has been reported to predict later child development. Therefore, strategies to ensure HHFS status in Bangladesh and similar settings should be considered for optimum child development.
Mismatch task conditions and error related ERPs
These findings suggest that the fronto-central N200 component, conceived an index of “reorientation of attention”, represents a correlate of an error signal, being produced when representation of the actual response and the required response are compared. Furthermore the magnitude of the amplitude of the N200 rests on the relation between the present and the previous stimulus.
pathways to literacy: connections between family assets and preschool children’s emergent literacy skills
Using a developmental assets framework, we examined the influences of family resources, routines, and stress on preschool-aged children’s emerging literacy development. Data were collected from 85 children as well as from their parents. Using path analysis, the results revealed that the more regular the routines in the household, the more likely parents were to engage their children in literacy enhancing activities, and in turn the higher the children’s print knowledge and reading interest. This was the case both initially and a year later. Results also showed that family resources and stress contributed to aspects of literacy development, although not as strongly as family routines. The findings suggest that interventions should include efforts to promote supportive family contexts as an additional means to enhance children’s literacy development.
from the Journal of Early Childhood Research
Crossmodal and incremental perception of audiovisual cues to emotional speech
In this article we report on two experiments about the perception of audiovisual cues to emotional speech. The article addresses two questions: (1) how do visual cues from a speaker’s face to emotion relate to auditory cues, and (2) what is the recognition speed for various facial cues to emotion? Both experiments reported below are based on tests with video clips of emotional utterances collected via a variant of the well-known Velten method. More specifically, we recorded speakers who displayed positive or negative emotions, which were congruent or incongruent with the (emotional) lexical content of the uttered sentence. In order to test this, we conducted two experiments.
The first experiment is a perception experiment in which Czech participants, who do not speak Dutch, rate the perceived emotional state of Dutch speakers in a bimodal (audiovisual) or a unimodal (audio- or vision-only) condition. It was found that incongruent emotional speech leads to significantly more extreme perceived emotion scores than congruent emotional speech, where the difference between congruent and incongruent emotional speech is larger for the negative than for the positive conditions. Interestingly, the largest overall differences between congruent and incongruent emotions were found for the audio-only condition, which suggests that posing an incongruent emotion has a particularly strong effect on the spoken realization of emotions.
from Language and Speech
Frequency of Use Leads to Automaticity of Production: Evidence from Repair in Conversation
In spontaneous speech, speakers sometimes replace a word they have just produced or started producing by another word. The present study reports that in these replacement repairs, low-frequency replaced words are more likely to be interrupted prior to completion than high-frequency words, providing support to the hypothesis that the production of high-frequency words is more automatic than the production of low-frequency words (Bybee, 2002; Logan, 1982). Frequency appears to have an effect on interruptibility even when word duration is statistically controlled. In addition, the frequency of the replaced word is positively correlated with the frequency of the word it is replaced by, supporting the hypothesis that high-frequency words are easier to access in production (Kittredge, Dell, Verkuilen, & Schwartz, 2008): vkapatsi@uoregon.edu the more frequent the target, the more frequent an inappropriate word needs to be to overcome the target and be uttered, only to be replaced.
from Language and Speech
Intonational Structure as a Word-boundary Cue in Tokyo Japanese
While listeners are recognizing words from the connected speech stream, they are also parsing information from the intonational contour. This contour may contain cues to word boundaries, particularly if a language has boundary tones that occur at a large proportion of word onsets. We investigate how useful the pitch rise at the beginning of an accentual phrase (APR) would be as a potential word-boundary cue for Japanese listeners. A corpus study shows that it should allow listeners to locate approximately 40—60% of word onsets, while causing less than 1% false positives. We then present a word-spotting study which shows that Japanese listeners can, indeed, use accentual phrase boundary cues during segmentation. This work shows that the prosodic patterns that have been found in the production of Japanese also impact listeners’ processing.
from Language and Speech
Spatial and Temporal Properties of Gestures in North American English /r/
Systematic syllable-based variation has been observed in the relative spatial and temporal properties of supralaryngeal gestures in a number of complex segments. Generally, more anterior gestures tend to appear at syllable peripheries while less anterior gestures occur closer to syllable peaks. Because previous studies compared only two gestures, it is not clear how to characterize the gestures, nor whether timing offsets are categorical or gradient. North American English /r/ is an unusually complex segment, having three supralaryngeal constrictions, but technological limitations have hindered simultaneous study of all three. A novel combination of M-mode ultrasound and optical tracking was used to measure gestural relations in productions of /r/ by nine speakers of Canadian English.
from Language and Speech
Testing Auditory Processing Skills and their Associations with Language in 4—5-year-olds
Infants’ auditory processing abilities have been shown to predict subsequent language development. In addition, poor auditory processing skills have been shown for some individuals with specific language impairment. Methods used in infant studies are not appropriate for use with young children, and neither are methods typically used to test auditory processing skills in specific language impairment (SLI). The objective in this study was to develop an appropriate way of testing auditory processing skills in children in the 4—5 year age range. We report data from 49 children aged 4—5 years (mean age 58.57 months) tested on five tasks with tones and synthesized syllables. Frequencies and inter-stimulus intervals were varied in the tone tasks; the second formant transitions between consonant and vowel were varied in the syllable tasks. Consistent with past research, variability was found in children’s auditory processing abilities. Significant correlations in discrimination thresholds for the tasks were found. The results from two regression analyses showed that the children’s auditory processing abilities predicted significant amounts of variance for receptive and expressive language.
from Language and Speech
Sensitivity of the human auditory cortex to acoustic degradation of speech and non-speech sounds
We propose that the increased activity of AEFs reflects cortical processing of acoustic properties common to both speech and non-speech stimuli. More specifically, the enhancement is most likely caused by spectral changes brought about by the decrease of amplitude resolution, in particular the introduction of periodic, signal-dependent distortion to the original sound. Converging evidence suggests that the observed AEF amplification could reflect cortical sensitivity to periodic sounds.
from BMC Neuroscience
What do patients with hereditary deafness think of genetic studies?
The results of the survey suggested that the vast majority of the respondents were satisfied with genetic testing for HL and that the barriers to take the genetic test were less than expected. However, some respondents have a negative attitude towards genetic testing and counseling. Furthermore, the issue of disclosure may be burdensome to patients.
from Auris Nasus Larynx
Discourse coherence and cognition after stroke: A dual task study
Several researchers have suggested that the maintenance of global coherence (topic maintenance) and local coherence (maintenance between utterances) in discourse requires cognitive resources. This study directly tests this hypothesis by examining the relationship between cognitive variables and coherence in narrative discourse produced by mobility-impaired stroke survivors under single (talking) and dual (talking and walking) task conditions. Although there were no effects of the dual task on coherence, global coherence was significantly disrupted regardless of the single or dual task condition. Moreover, global coherence strongly correlated with cognitive function measures, whereas local coherence did not. Findings are consistent with two interpretations: 1) that global and local coherence may be subserved by different cognitive processes or 2) that maintaining global coherence is a more difficult task and thus will show effects of cognitive impairment before local coherence is impaired. These are both testable hypotheses for future research.
from the Journal of Communication Disorders
